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I’m really glad you brought up weed legalization with Hillary Clinton Thursday night. This is how cynical lawmakers are here in Florida: Last week, the governor signed a bill that would allow taxpayers to burn a doobie only if they’re dying. That’s right, if you can prove the blood you’re puking is due to a terminal condition, Florida legislators have promised not to prosecute you for trying to feel better. Our representatives are obviously hoping voters here are sadistic and/or clueless enough to buy into Florida’s indecent new “Right To Try Act,” so that they’ll reject an upcoming medical marijuana referendum that would render Tallahassee’s idiocy irrelevant. The November referendum would extend marijuana palliatives to taxpayers suffering from cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, HIV, PTSD, Crohn’s and Parkinson’s disease. Like, while they still have a chance to enjoy life.

Q: How come a talk-show comic is the only broadcaster in the U.S. who consistently asks politicians questions about UFOs? A: Because he’s in the entertainment division, not news? /CREDIT: elle.com

Anyway, dude, I’ve been trying to think of how many times I’ve heard debate moderators take marijuana to the presidential contenders lately and I’m drawing blanks. All I seem to remember are questions about how to nuke or strengthen Obamacare, or about which one of those suits packs enough crotch lumber to emasculate ISIS. So good on you, Jimmy, for asking questions the Fourth Estate treats like boogers.

I hate when people communicate in capital letters. It’s like whatever they’re trying to say is so lame it can’t stand up without visual crutches. So I own this lapse of judgment. It’s just that, sometimes, man, I forget you’re only a late-night talk-show comic instead of Charlie Rose or John Dickerson or Lester Holt or Gwen Ifill or any other news division talking head who should be asking these questions if only UFOs weren’t beneath their high thresholds for professional excellence.

And you had her going there, Jimmy, you had her. Clinton not only didn’t break out into hives when you mentioned The Great Taboo last week, she reiterated her comments from December about wanting to bring transparency to federal UFO records. Why am I so surprised by this? Why – given her alleged longstanding interest in this stuff, not to mention her campaign chairman’s decade-long efforts to swing this conversation into the mainstream – why am I so surprised to see the former Secretary of State exhibiting a level of conversational sophistication (e.g., preferring the acronym UAP over UFO) heretofore unimaginable for anyone running for president? Especially in an election year.

Here’s why I’m surprised: Because you’re the first human being to ask her about it on national TV. Nobody else does that. Ever. Except you do. You ask Bill Clinton about UFOs. You ask President Obama about UFOs. That means you’re, like, in my mind, Gayle King or Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzkrieg or whatever. You’re making history here. And you got HRC to say “Unless it’s a threat to national security, I think we oughtta share it with the public” if she finds classified UFO records. Which begs that logical followup question: How could UFOs affect national security? Only, your response was, “Well, what if everybody’s all hopped up on medical marijuana and everyone gets paranoid?”

AAAARGH! AIEEEEE!

Sorry (again). Anyhow. Jimmy. I know. You’re just a comedian. But thanks for the punchline setup anyway. It’s still better than anything we’re getting from CNN or NBC or XYzzzzzz …

Oh, and next time you see Trump, ask if he thinks he’s man enough to build the world’s most wonderful fabulous astounding quality reefer dispensary in the history of mankind.

Props to Green Bay QB Aaron Rodgers for sharing a detailed and provocative account of a 2005 UFO sighting in New Jersey. The story blew up in the sports world, even though we all know that if Blaine Gabbert or Josh Freeman had gone public with similar tales, and perhaps with even more material evidence, nobody would’ve bothered to yawn. Still, Rodgers’ story will dissolve into more immediate noise and be forgotten soon enough. Meanwhile, researchers who keep trying to hold government accountable will continue their labors in obscurity.

Which brings us to this week’s question: Did the Federal Aviation Administration redact key portions of an audio file concerning an airline crew sighting of a UFO over Utah on January 14? That’s the not-even-mildly shocking allegation being made by retired meteorologist and researcher William Puckett, who regularly combs Uncle Sam’s radar files for weird stuff. And he’s pretty jazzed about what he found out. In fact, says Puckett, “This may be the best radar-visual case I’ve ever worked.”

It was a chance discovery, made by a nightowl Utah ham operator who randomly listened in on cockpit chatter between pilots and Air Traffic Control two months ago. He contacted Utah’s state MUFON director, who in turn brought Puckett into the conversation. Puckett queried the FAA for whatever he could get. Beaucoup data came back, enough for a reconstruction of events. The plane turned out to be an Airbus 321, aka American Airlines Flight 434. It was on the way to Philadelphia from San Francisco. Things got interesting shortly after midnight MST. That’s when the ham operator, Pat Daniels, said he heard 434 ask ATC if they were scoping a brightly illuminated bogey, somewhere below their cruising altitude of 31,000 feet. Daniels heard two bursts of dialogue spaced about a minute apart. He said ATC told the crew it had no radar on it. But that’s not true.

We’d really like to help you, buddy, but as public servants, we’re obliged to inform you that you just can’t get there from here/CREDIT: www.autofish.net

Puckett, whose analysis is available at his UFOs Northwest website, not only recovered the bogey’s radar tracks through FOIA. He created an animated version of those peculiar pingbacks, which cropped up in 434’s vicinity from 12:08 to 12:15 a.m. With each 12-second sweep of the radar, an object or objects got painted above Interstate 15, a few miles south of a sleepy little blip called Nephi, population 5,500. In stark contrast to the linear northeasterly course of Flight 434, the unidentified target followed an incoherent path, popping up here and there like a meth-addled whack-a-mole.

Puckett received 41 seconds of radio chatter from the FAA, recorded between 12:12 and 12:13. He posted that on his site too, but it doesn’t entirely square with what Daniels insists he heard. Flight 434 asks ATC if it’s tracking a “bright orange square.” ATC hesitates, then replies, “Uhhm, no, that’s a good question, I’m not sure what – is it off to your right side?” 434 says “It’s apparently off our nose right now” and “we’ve been watching it for awhile” and “I don’t know what it is, it’s a perfect, uh, square, it’s bright orange.” 434 asks what town they’re skirting at “2 o’clock low.” ATC says Nephi. And that’s it. No mas.

Puckett says he could’ve obtained an even more detailed profile on the mystery — like target altitude, maybe — if military bureaucrats hadn’t tightened the rules on releasable radar material a few years ago. But that’s another story. Right now, Puckett wonders, if ATC wasn’t monitoring anything unusual, why did it ask 434 if the bogey was off its right side? Because that’s exactly where it was, according to the radar map. Puckett says radar indicates ATC was locked in the whole time, and he points to a gap in the voice-recording spectrogram which — he says — indicates a block of dialogue was scrubbed out.

Puckett’s report goes on to scratch balloons, drones, false echoes, military ops, etc., from the suspect list, and again, you can run through all that on his web page. It’s worth a pause. And it raises this question: Is resolving the apparent spectrogram discrepancy worth the effort? Maybe. But not for De Void. De Void has pretty much given up on bureauville. De Void can’t even get U.S. Customs and Border Protection to declassify a UFO video that’s been on the Internet for three years.

But let’s step back for an even broader demoralizing framework, courtesy of the Associated Press. They ran with this lead on March 15, during the annual “Sunshine Week” update on the shabby state of government transparency: “The Obama administration set a record for the number of times its federal employees told disappointed citizens, journalists, and others that despite searching they couldn’t find a single page requested under the Freedom of Information Act.”

In other words: The feds couldn’t produce squat for one of every six FOIA requests that rang their customer-service bells last year. Want more? No? Seventy-seven percent of their responses either laid goose eggs or contained partially censored information — that’s 12 percent higher than Obama’s first year in office. Worst (apparent) offender? The EPA office supervising New York and New Jersey. Those working stiffs couldn’t find what people asked for 58 percent of the time.

The Customs department looks like Boy Scouts next to that; Customs was worthless just 34 percent of the time. And one more thing: To its credit, Customs admitted to De Void that it actually did find the Aguadilla UFO footage during its records search. They just have no intention of releasing it, even though it’s been seen more than 56,000 times on YouTube. What’s a good 50-cent word for that sort of spitefulness – contumacious?

Anyhow, William Puckett, good luck working the FAA. You’re a better man than I am.

Last week, The O’Reilly Factor made room for a five-minute clip of something called “Watters World.” Relatively unfamiliar with the Fox News culture, De Void had never heard of Jesse Watters. His forte, as subsequent research suggests, involves sticking a microphone in strangers’ faces and letting them make idiots of themselves, which is almost as easy as squashing caterpillars.

This installment finds the Ed Helms wannabe shooting fish in a barrel in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the International UFO Congress went down last month. Up and running for 25 years and billing itself as “The Guinness World Record holding largest UFO convention,” the IUC is what you’d call a target-rich environment. Chock full o’ space alien booths, blowup dolls, Little Green Men sculptures, and visually conspicuous abductees eager to share their adventures, the lobby is jammed with sideshow cash cows that help pay the rent. Like, who else is going to help pay the rent at a UFO convention? Apple? General Dynamics? Taco Bell? The predictable result, of course, is that few journalists, particularly the standup blow-drys, can make it past the eye candy and into the lecture halls for the meat ‘n taters.

Maybe if I run this pitcher I can generate more traffic for De Void and broaden its appeal/CREDIT: redstate.com

One could argue that mainstream media coverage of the IUC serves as a template for America’s broader relationship with The Great Taboo, where clichés, sound bites, and sideways glances are plenty sufficient for diversionary weekend fare. Miss something that truly freaked out officialdom? Never mind, we got a 20-second seg from a dude who got butt-probed by Reptoids and has the illustrations to prove it. In fact, a Phoenix station’s treatment of the IUC gathering in 2014 so perfectly mirrored the current state of inquiry, De Void invented the Jessica Flores Disembodied Head Award for UFO Journalism in tribute. Unfortunately, Jesse Watters is ineligible because the equally clueless Jessica Flores actually thought she was doing real reporting.

Watters certainly isn’t that naïve. He walks into the joint with the mischievous twinkle-eyed certitude of a guy who knows he’s the first man on Earth who ever thought of doing a number on goofy looking UFO devotees. If he’d bothered to stick his head into the auditorium, he might’ve come away with a story about truly mystifying UFO footage captured by federal border patrol agents and the FOIA clampdown on radar records. That angle certainly would’ve been news to Fox viewers. But Watters knows his audience and goes visceral, the way popular culture molded him. He interviews two Donald Trump-supporting abductees, one of whom is tie-dyed and pink-haired, and the other claims she was whisked off to the moon, where she confronted a body snatcher that looks like a giant praying mantis. In case his viewers don’t get the satire – it’s Fox, after all – Watters punches it up with sight gags from “Dr. Strangelove,” “Mars Attacks,” “The Honeymooners,” etc., along with Trump himself proclaiming “I love the poorly educated!” And as Watters informs another Trump-supporter — famous “Fire in the Sky” abductee Travis Walton — “I think the aliens want Hillary. That’s why they sent James Carville down to Earth.” In other words, it’s one gut-bustin’ knee-slapper after another.

De Void would like to think, given recent efforts by Clinton campaign advisor John Podesta to reframe The Great Taboo as the government transparency and accountability issue it’s been all along, that “Watters World” stunts might someday evolve into something a tad more original and enterprising. The odds are against it, but who knows? Once upon a time the Berlin Wall was as immutable as a geological formation.

Ohio State political science professor Alexander Wendt, co-author of an academic analysis of the sociological pressures arrayed against authentic inquiry into the mystery, thinks Podesta’s initiative might pay off in the long run.

“To me,” he writes in an email to De Void, “it exemplifies the power of human agency against even the strongest societal discourses, like the UFO taboo, and I hope it succeeds. That said, I’m doubtful that even full disclosure will reveal anything more than the depth of the government’s ignorance about what UFOs are, and as such it won’t resolve the question in favor of the ET hypothesis by any means.

“But still, even if Podesta’s focus on disclosure is a strategic dead-end, it will help ‘normalize’ the issue, making it possible for reporters and politicians to talk about UFOs in a non-sneering way, just like they would about any other topic, and that’s all to the good insofar as it helps change the broader culture surrounding this issue.”

Well, Fox News is Fox News. But maybe some of the others could get there if the lobbies of UFO conferences weren’t so much damned fun.

Seriously, man, what does John Podesta know about the national character that we don’t?

The Clinton machine has opened a massive lead over Bernie Sanders and is steamrolling toward the Democratic nomination. No reason to go off-topic, no reason to tweak the game plan, and certainly no reason to give political adversaries additional targets, not with the Justice Department and the FBI poring over Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails in search of illegalities. This is when you coast on autopilot and stick with the talking points.

“I’ve come into my fair share of people raising questions about whether I’m off my rocker but I’ve been a long-time advocate of declassification of records” — John Podesta/CREDIT: rawstory.com

And yet, this week, HRC’s campaign manager went and did it again. Little green men, space aliens, beam me up – Podesta didn’t say any of those things but that’s the funhouse door he opened when he went on record, once more, about bringing transparency to federal UFO records. He gave the interview to KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, where George Knapp is the only investigative mainstream broadcast reporter in America who’s got their *#@! together when it comes to covering The Great Taboo. And Podesta took responsibility/blame for the remarks Clinton made in December about wanting to “get to the bottom” of the UFO mystery

“I think I’ve convinced her,” Podesta said in an interview that aired Tuesday, “that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and to declassify as much as we can so that more people can have their legitimate questions answered. And more attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people who are in public life, who are serious about this, being ridiculed.”

Podesta’s UFO offensive is so unprecedented and counterintuitive that De Void can’t even come up with an analogy. There’s no demographic constituency here, no political capital, certainly no way to monetize this elephant in the room. The only parallel that comes to mind is hypothetical, like if, say, Walter Mondale had campaigned for legalized weed in 1984 against Mr. Morning in America. But even weed had a libertarian constituency during the notorious prison-swelling Just Say No era. And the last time De Void bothered to look, the free-marketplace-of-ideas Cato Institute ran like a firehosed monkey when confronted with the prospect of treating UFOs as a legitimate political issue.

The dialogue Podesta advocates is so revolutionary, in fact, its realization might even challenge the anthropocentric conceits we use to define ourselves. In the groundbreaking 2008 Political Theory journal essay “Sovereignty and the UFO,” Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall argue that such a sober reassessment could prove more subversive than anyone predicts.

“The ontological threat is that even if the ETs were benign, their confirmed presence would create tremendous pressure for a unified human response, or world government,” they write. “The sovereign identity of the modern state is partly constituted in and through its difference from other such states, which gives modern sovereignty its plural character. Any exteriority that required subsuming this difference into a global sovereignty would threaten what the modern state is, quite apart from the risk of physical destruction.”

Well now, there’s an image. And a remote one, at this point. On the other hand, maybe Podesta understands more about our capacity to manage new ideas than we’ve been allowed to demonstrate. Maybe smearing someone as a “UFO believer” doesn’t reap the same dividends it used to; curiously, no one has tried to weaponize Podesta’s agenda against HRC. At least, not yet. Which is weird, because that’s the obvious play here. Maybe the GOP is too busy fussing over the size of Donald Trump’s schlong to unleash the Little Green Men noise right now.

Either way, a veteran political strategist has given the press a license to ask questions without fear of stigma. But whether the media has the smarts for it – that’s like giving a cigarette lighter to a 7-year-old and telling him to act responsibly.

De Void’s UFO psychodrama with President Clinton’s former associate Attorney General Webster “Webb” Hubbell briefly defied rigor mortis last week in yet another round of pointless emails. For latecomers to this adventure of the mind, here’s the cheat sheet first:

Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice, Little Rock mayor, and Rose Law Firm partner with Hillary Clinton in the 1970s, Hubbell joined the Clinton Justice Department in 1993. The erstwhile Razorback offensive tackle resigned in 1994 during a tax fraud investigation, which produced an indictment and a conviction. After pulling time in the clanger, Hubbell in his 1997 autobiography Friends In High Places dropped a weird little teaser about how No. 42 assigned him to gather previously undisclosed information about UFOs and the JFK assassination. Webb wrote he didn’t have any luck, and he let it go at that. But his claims begged for elucidation.

During a 2012 email exchange with De Void, Webb Hubbell stated “All of your questions will be answered” about his research into UFOs. But he didn’t answer a thing/CREDIT: nairalandnews.com

In 2012, with a former CIA agent stating he discovered a smoking-gun cache of Roswell evidence in the Agency’s archives in 1995, De Void contacted Hubbell for a response. What followed was a protracted and bizarre exchange that – fshhzzt! – simply fizzled out like a little party balloon. Still, De Void continued to receive Webb’s email blasts because he’s writing books now, fiction this time, thrillers evidently. Earlier this month, I got another one touting the upcoming release of quote “the next Jack Patterson Thriller, A Game of Inches, which comes out in May.”

So what the hell, right?

To Webb Hubbell, 2/17/16, 4:18 p.m.: How about a comment or two on the Hillary/Podesta advocacy for transparency on UFOs?

Two minutes later …

To Billy Cox, 2/17/16, 4:20 p.m.: That’s a good idea. W

WTF?

To Webb Hubbell, 2/17/16, 4:21 p.m.: Seriously, it could help promote your book.

To Webb Hubbell, 2/18/16, 9:13 a.m. Great. Should we do a phoner, or would you prefer a list of email questions?

No reply. But it’s Thursday. Give him the weekend to climb into the attic and lug down all those boxloads of notes.

The weekend comes and goes. Monday comes and goes. Now it’s Tuesday.

To Webb Hubbell, 2/23/16, 10:00 a.m.: Cold feet? I get that. Still – it’s time this country had the long overdue adult conversation. I hope you’ll be a part of it.

To Billy Cox, 2/23/16, 10:13 a.m.: Don’t have cold feet. Its not March yet. W.

Hunh? Doesn’t the weather start to warm up in March? Maybe he’s in the Southern Hemisphere. Either way, screw it, the bobber’s still twitching.

To Webb Hubbell, 2/23/16, 1:26 p.m.: OK, here goes: Was there any context for your assignment to look for UFO records? In other words, were you aware of any longstanding interest by the Clintons in the phenomenon before they got to the White House? Did you ask why President was interested in this subject?

Do you remember exactly when President Clinton initially contacted you about researching UFOs/JFK? Was the assignment a surprise to you, or had you sort of been expecting it? Personally, I might’ve thought someone with military or intelligence credentials would be better positioned to dig for this stuff.

Did you ask for an intelligence briefing on the subject? If so, who did that for you and what were you told? How much time did you devote to your research? Was it just you or did you have staffers helping out? With what agencies or individuals did you consult? Did you check in with John Gibbons at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy? How much did you know about Laurance Rockefeller’s lobbying efforts to bring transparency to this issue? Any interaction with John Podesta on UFOs during this period? When you stated you didn’t find anything, was it because there was nothing there, or was it because you ran into a wall of classification? Were you satisfied with the access you got? When and why did you conclude your search? And how surprised are you today that Podesta and Hillary aren’t afraid to talk about an issue that most politicians wouldn’t touch without strapping themselves into hazmat suits?

Evidently the Clinton library has released more than 7,000 pages of files on the JFK assassination. Were you surprised by anything you discovered on that end?

Again, I’ll be happy to mention your book.

No reply. He’s probably deliriously ecstatic about having his literary endeavors promoted in De Void. I’ll give him a night to steady his nerves. He’ll probably have something waiting for me in my inbox first thing in the morning.

To Webb Hubbell, 2/24/16, 3:05 p.m.: OK, just for the sake of clarity, you were just pulling my chain, right?

The day goes by. Then another day. And another. This is soooo not the way to get De Void to rave about the next Jack Patterson Thriller.

Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed H.R. 4441, aka the Aviation Innovation, Reform & Reauthorization Act (AIRR). It’s a thorough overhaul of America’s air traffic control (ATC) system. How thorough? Well, like all the way down to “SEC. 122. MOTHERS’ ROOMS AT AIRPORTS (a)(10) ‘lactation area’ means a room or other location in a commercial airport that – (A) provides a location for members of the public to express breast milk that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from the public; (B) has a door that can be locked; (C) includes a place to sit, a table or other flat surface, and an electrical outlet; (D) is readily accessible to and usable by” whereas henceforth forsooth to wit etc etc blahblahblah.

H.R. 4441 is packed with unbearable lawyer compost, but it all comes down to this mission statement: “To transfer operation of air traffic services currently provided by the Federal Aviation Administration to a separate not-for-profit corporate entity, to reauthorize and streamline programs of the Federal Aviation Administration, and for other purposes.” Still awake? In other words, Congress wants to privatize ATC operations in America, which would be known henceforth forthwith toot sweet thusly as the “ATC Corporation.”

De Void tends to have allergic reactions to so many privatization bills, especially from this most execrable 114th edition of Congressional banty roosters, the way they audition so loudly for corporate sponsors and scratch “public service” from the resume to-do list. But crony capitalism can indeed generate the desired budgetary benefits, and Robert Powell doesn’t quarrel with the overall principle of saving taxpayer money. “Private companies probably do a better job with costs than government does,” he says.

What does concern MUFON’s director of research is the lack of transparency that will likely characterize this pending ATC Corporation. Powell is the co-author of two of the most significant analyses of UFO incidents over the last decade: MUFON’s Stephenville report in 2008, and last year’s Scientific Coalition for Ufology investigation into the Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, encounter of 2013. The former was a doozy; it involved F-16s, a snafu in the USAF PR machine, and an apparent hole in the security dome around George W. Bush’s home in Texas. The latter was less garish but equally freaky. This one contains thermal-imaging footage, still-anonymous federal whistleblowers, an eerily incurious U.S. Customs and Border Protection chain of command, and this small weird flying thing that not only skirted the treetops but plunged through ocean water and split in two before taking flight again. And it made for a potential flight safety angle as well.

What links these narratives together is our own technology — radar. And this federal radar data, produced by FOIA laws that actually worked, should be sparking a conversation worthy of peer-reviewed arguments. Sadly, public access to those types of records began drying up, in almost arbitrary fashion, long before the ATC Corporation was a gleam in the eye of bill sponsor Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA).

Powell and SCU got their fill of private-sector glasnost during their lengthy query into Aguadilla. Corroborating the puzzling video sequence were radar profiles of the tracking craft, provided by the USAF. And those were among the final documents to dribble out of the 84th Radar Evaluation Squadron before the feds drained the pond. What really sucked was the FAA’s response to a request for control tower logs during the flying-submarine incident at the nearby airport, designated BQN.

“We were not able to conduct a search,” stated an FAA eunich in 2014, “because BQN is a Federal Contract Tower. These facilities are non-government entities operated by Robinson Aviation, Inc., under contract to the FAA. They are not obligated to provide records pursuant to the FOIA program.” When Powell’s team asked Robinson Aviation to produce those logs, Robinson demonstrated it wasn’t even obligated to acknowledge the query.

De Void is waiting to hear back from Shuster’s office about whether this theoretical money-saving ATC Corporation would be exempt from public records laws. But Steven Aftergood’s reading of the AIRR language is bleak.

“The pending legislation says that the proposed new ATC Corporation would not be an ‘agency.’ Therefore,” emailed the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, “it would appear to be beyond the reach of the FOIA. Some work-arounds might be possible. For example, it might still be possible to use FOIA to obtain Corporation records that are held by US government agencies. But it would complicate things, and it might not work.”

Might not work. Hm. Sounds like this whole AIRR project might work out fine for a hugely unbelievable Trump-class lactation area, shielded from view and free from intrusion from the public. If ATC Corporation becomes the law of the land, De Void predicts La Leche Leaguers won’t be the only ones getting milked.

Since 2006, Roll Call has filed six stories on UFOs, focusing chiefly on the futile efforts of “Disclosure” lobbyist Stephen Bassett to engage Congress on the issue. Along the way, Roll Call has managed to keep the Little Green Man clichés largely in check. On Thursday, reporter Warren Rojas logged his third related story since 2015. In one of those whatever-happened-to? profiles, he caught up with former Rep. Lynn Woolsey. Actually, he tried touching bases with each of the six ex-pols who presided over Bassett’s flawed but attention-grabbing week-long Citizen Hearing on Disclosure (CHD) in Washington, D.C., in 2013.

Is one of the most despised congressional editions in the history of the republic ducking UFOs because it’s afraid they might skank up its reputation?/CREDIT: hj1015.com

Woolsey told Rojas she thought a new administration should definitely take a fresh look at the thing that simply will not go away. She even made allusions to whistleblower amnesty: “This is the perfect subject to prove how disclosure in some instances (is) impossible and how threatened people feel when they have information that our government doesn’t want out. And I find that appalling.”

Rojas says he considers UFOs fair game for Beltway media grist, especially given the fact that Congress refuses to talk about it. Although Bassett sent DVD packages of Citizen Hearing testimony to everyone on The Hill, neither he nor Rojas can wring so much as a “f*#! off” from the black hole of the Dome.

“I’ve done my due diligence and I haven’t gotten a single person on Capitol Hill to admit to having the material,” says Rojas. “It’s complete radio silence.”

Bassett reiterates in an email that every member of Congress received copies. Furthermore, “All Congressional offices were also provided web access to the CHD. I have met with staff from a dozen offices and about to reapproach 180 offices with meeting requests.”

Rojas doesn’t take a stand one way or the other on the controversy. But between Clinton’s conversational levity on UFOs and campaign director John Podesta’s avowed and longstanding skepticism of official window dressing, Rojas says he isn’t averse to pressing public officials for at least a comment, if not a dialogue.

“When Bassett distributed his 30 hours of (Disclosure) testimony to the media, I thought it was right in our wheelhouse. I find it fascinating that he’s been able to keep this going for as long as he has,” says Rojas. “Could there be something to it? Sure. Whether you believe it or not, people are talking about it.” Worthy of more media attention? “In this election cycle, sure, why not? Podesta keeps stoking the fires, Clinton’s talking about it, Woolsey’s talking about it. I don’t think it’s out of bounds at all.”

I first met moonwalker Edgar Mitchell in late 1995, at a restaurant in the back yard of Kennedy Space Center, which was getting ready to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Apollo 14. Given how NASA types tended to treat UFO questions like warlocks and unicorns, De Void was unprepared for Mitchell’s receptivity. No, he insisted, he hadn’t seen evidence of UFOs during his off-planet adventures. “NASA at that time was so sure there were no such things, there was no discussion of it.” But he added this: “I would say, however, that if there was knowledge of ET contact existing within the government, and we were sent into space blind and dumb to such information, I think it is a case of criminal culpability.”

Criminal culpability. Whoa. Thus began a long conversation with one of the old astronaut corps’ unique thinkers. This was a guy who, after admitting he conducted ESP experiments on the moon in 1971, took a lot of crap from colleagues – and he didn’t care. He went onto formalize his curiosity about human consciousness by founding the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which went on to publish papers on everything from meditation to the “Physical effects of collective attention at Burning Man 2013.”

“There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles.” — Dr. Edgar Mitchell /CREDIT: collectspace.com

Anyhow, the former Navy captain rolled his own tobacco that night, back when you could still smoke indoors, and he talked about one of his even more unusual intrigues. A year or so earlier, during Air Force efforts to resolve General Accounting Office questions about missing records related to the 1947 Roswell controversy, USAF Secretary Sheila Widnall had granted amnesty to potential whistleblowers who might produce leads, but by that time the major players were dead. One year after that, without naming names, Mitchell said he was in discussions with former military or government operatives who wanted to extend immunity to cover even more UFO insiders.

“The purpose of the meeting was not to convince anybody else of their stories,” he said, “but to get people released from their security oaths with regard to these phenomena. Given who they were, and their credentials, I have to tell you, it pushed my confidence level up five notches.” Mitchell said he was shaken by what he was learning. “I am convinced there is a small body of valid (UFO) information, and that there is a body of information ten times as big that is total disinformation put out by the sources to confuse the whole issue.” He described the setup as “a body of semi- or quasi-private organization” operating with black-budget federal funding. “And nobody knows what goes into black budgets. The prime requisite is security first and everything else second.”

Without more details, Mitchell’s allegations sounded like something Fox Mulder’s scriptwriters could’ve hatched without really trying. We now know that the sixth man on the moon had, in 1995, begun huddling with “Ambassador to the Universe” Disclosure guru Steven Greer, whose ET outreach tuition now begins at $2,500 a pop. The Mitchell-Greer bond fell apart when Greer began using Mitchell’s name as a witness to promote his Disclosure initiative. Mitchell, in fact, had no first-hand knowledge of Greer’s alleged cloak-and-dagger scenario, and he charged Greer with “overreach(ing) his data continuously.”

But in 2008 – and once again, without naming names – Mitchell stoked the embers when he told CNN’s Larry King he had met a high-level Pentagon official pooh-bah who told Mitchell that he – the pooh-bah official – couldn’t get his hands on classified UFO documents because he lacked the proper security clearance. But that was a story Greer had been repeating for years. And that official was Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, former Defense Intelligence Agency director and – at the time of his meeting with Mitchell in 1997 – director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So De Void got on the horn to Wilson, whose golden parachute had made for a soft-retirement landing with a defense contractor in Minnesota. Wilson definitely remembered Mitchell asking him about pursuing UFO leads. But Wilson also said he had all the security passes he needed. “What is true is that I met with them,” Wilson told De Void in a phoner. “What is not true is that I was denied access to this material, because I didn’t pursue it. I may have left it open with them, but it was not especially compelling, not compelling enough to waste my staff’s time to go looking for it.”

Mitchell told De Void he was “shocked” by Wilson’s answer. Ever the gentleman, however, Mitchell declined to argue: “I do not wish to engage him on this matter.” For his part, Greer stood by his Wilson story in an email: “I was there and I know what he said. I was also informed prior to the meeting that, after sending him a secret document with UFO-related code names and numbers, that he located one of the compartments but was specifically denied access to the operation.” And that was that.

But so earnestly did Mitchell want to get to the bottom of the mystery that he traveled to Mexico City for the unveiling of what would be the biggest UFO fiasco of 2015 – the Roswell space alien cadaver pix, which were being hyped as a game-changer by promoters. Within days, the images were discovered to be Kodak slides of a Native American mummy. De Void didn’t attempt to contact the Apollo veteran for reaction after that. But living in fear of making mistakes would’ve been an untenable prospect for one of only a dozen men to leave bootprints on another world.

“The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill,” he wrote in his autobiography The Way of the Explorer, “are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.” After literally expanding the perimeters of human history, what could possibly be intimidating after that? Name-calling?

So bon voyage, Dr. Mitchell. And here’s hoping that your greatest wish for those who determine our fates will someday come to pass: “From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

Since you’re a “UFO fanatic” – obviously nobody in the biz knew what foo fighters were until you came along – just wanted to tip you off to some new cool stuff online about your band’s namesake. OK, check that, it’s not new, right, we’re talking Second World War. But it’s the latest accessible material from Keith Chester, posted in December at “U.F.O Historical Revue.”

Pedal to the metal –Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl should remind Hillary Clinton that people are paying attention to her avowed interest in UFOs/CREDIT: youtube.com

You did read Chester’s book, right? Back in ’07? Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II? Um, maybe not, you’re pretty busy. Anyway, this guy, Keith Chester, he pays about a hundred visits to the National Archives and Records Administration over the years. He collects, like, two shelf-feet of pertinent military records and comes back with a gold mine, man: official memos, debriefing accounts, after-action reports, you name it. I mean, who does this stuff anymore?

Now, dude, I know you know how foo-fighter encounters first broke in the U.S. press big-time in late 1944-early 1945, and how the guys on the front lines thought official attempts to blow it off as ball lightning and/or St. Elmo’s fire were a big joke. (Hell, a 415th Night Fighter Squadron veteran right here in Sarasota chuckled in contempt a few years back when he recounted the contortions …) But were you aware that what the Allies began referring to as “phenomena” turned heads from the very beginning of the war? And that before they were dubbed foo fighters late in the game, there were reports from both theaters of airborne and vaguely menacing “stove pipes,” “cylinders,” “orange crates,” “pie-plate discs,” “flying doughnuts,” “fire extinguishers,” “ball and chains,” “egg shapes,” “soap bubbles,” “resembling Zeppelins” and “balloons,” even when they moved against the wind? Thank god foo fighters was the name that stuck, ay? I’m guessing you wouldn’t have gone from Nirvana to The Flying Doughnuts. (On the other hand, there were The Flying Burrito Brothers. Hmm …)

Anyhow, the documents Chester recovered are loaded with so many incidents of bombers and fighters trying unsuccessfully to shake their spooky and infuriating maneuverability, you start losing track after awhile. If I were going to Hollywood this thing, I’d cast Richard Pryor – yeah, I know it’s not accurate or feasible – as an excitable ball turret gunner finding the range – “Whoa mother*#!%errrrr! My turn now, MY turn!” – and raking the sky with twin .50s. Then I’d zoom in on the bug-eyed disbelief. Because shooting these things was useless.

While crossing Holland on 6/25/42, RAF bomber pilot Lt. Roman Sabinski tells his tail-gunner to “Give it a blast” when a full moon-sized copper-colored object jumps from just off the left wing to the right at instantaneous speed; tracer rounds indicate direct hits, to no effect. Shortly after D-Day, British Lancaster bomber pilot George Barton reports being tailed following a raid over Germany by a cluster of “spheres”; neither evasion nor gunfire deter the ultimately harmless pursuers (if that’s indeed what they were).

In August 1944, after striking oil refineries in Sumatra, numerous crews with the 468th Bombardment Group get rattled by what they regard as “a bizarre and confusing type of new weapon.” One bomber reports being “under continuous attack for 1 hour and 10 minutes” by a swarm of baseball-sized reddish-orange spheres that tend explode into four to five smaller balls without inflicting any damage. No ground or ocean flashes are detected, and “on one occasion,” states a report, “the course was altered sufficiently to allow tail guns to bear in the direction of the bursts, but 20-mm and 50-cal. fire from the B-29 had no visible effect.”

Anyway, man, I’m guessing if foo fighters had killed any of our guys, you might’ve chosen a different name for your band. But De Void likes the title of this report: “Additional Information On The Observation Of Silvery Colored Discs On Mission to Stuttgart, 6 Sept. 1943,” prepared by the 384th Bombardment Group for the 1st Bombardment Wing. During an air battle with German planes, two B-17 crews watched as a third was descended upon by a “cluster” of silver colored objects that may have collectively been as long as 75 feet, and 20 feet wide. Nobody saw attack planes dropping ordnance. They noted only that some of it collided with a B-17 and “the wing immediately started to burn,” which resulted in the loss of the bomber.

Nazi tech or whatever, this stuff couldn’t be ignored, and by January ’45, a secret report, subject matter “Night Phenomenon,” reached XII Tactical Air Command from one of the Air Force intelligence officers: “We have encountered a phenomenon which we cannot explain; crews have been followed by lights that blink on and off changing colors etc. The lights come very close and fly in formation with our planes. They are agitating and keep the crews on edge when they encounter them, mainly because they cannot explain them.”

On and on it goes. Point is, the latest installment of the history nobody knows is available online now at http://greenwoodufoarchive.com/uhr/uhr17.pdf It describes another couple of futile shooting incidents, but De Void likes the part where U.S. pilots tried to turn the tables and gave chase to the foo fighters. The foo fighters responded by trying to lure the warplanes into “a concentrated flak area.” Critics who suggested the airmen were being duped by St. Elmo’s fire provoked this pilot rejoinder: “Well, let the sons of bitches come over and fly a mission with us.”

Getting a little long-winded here, Dave. Sorry. Only reason I bring it up is that with Hillary Clinton and campaign manager John Podesta stating they want to “get to the bottom” of UFOs, the Foo Fighters should consider contributing an anthem to nudge it along. It doesn’t really matter who you’re voting for. It’s about reminding them to keep their eyes on the ball. ‘Til then, see you at the Devil’s Tower.

The only way the buildup to Sunday night’s revival of “The X-Files” could’ve been better last week is if Klatuu had tossed UFO beer cans across the White House lawn. First, the “alien megastructure” debate over KIC 8462852 was reenergized when analysts eliminated comet swarms as a cause of the dimming phenomenon surrounding a star located 1,480 light years from Earth. Maybe, as hypothesized in October, ET engineers really are building massive off-world platforms after all.

Then came the Caltech researchers announcing the inferential existence, based on the orbital patterns of Kuiper Belt debris, of a Neptune-sized “Planet Nine.” Although this thing is projected to have a mass 10 times greater than Earth, the real spine-tingler was its predicted 15,000 year solar orbit. That could mean Planet Nine is actually Nibiru, of alleged Sumerian lore, home to the antediluvian Anunnaki gold-hunters who came to Earth and created homo sapien hybrids for slave laborers to work the gold mines.

Finally, last Friday just after 5 p.m., probably after the supervisors had knocked off for the weekend, somebody at the CIA tweeted “Take a Peek Into Our #XFiles” and posted links to Agency documents that have been in public circulation since Jimmy Carter was president. Nothing new here for the hardcores, but hey, get a load of that report dated 8/1/52: “It is recommended that CIA surveillance of subject matter [UFOs], in coordination with proper authorities of primary operational concern at ATIC, be continued. It is strongly urged, however, that no indication of CIA interest or concern reach the press or public, in view of their probably alarmist tendencies to accept such interest as ‘confirmatory’ of the soundness of ‘unpublished facts’ in the hands of the U.S. Government.”

What does it mean when nostalgia is a TV show whose slogans included “Trust No One” and “Deny Everything”?/CREDIT: ngabo.org

Say what? The CIA wanted to protect us from our alarmist tendencies? Why would they say that? What would we have to be alarmed about? Unpublished facts? Which unpublished facts? Proper authorities? By whose definition is authority proper?

Anyhow, yeah, I was rooting for the reprise of Mulder and Scully to be as exciting as the return of the Nibiru slavers. Maybe it was nostalgia for the infancy of the World Wide Web, when consumers were still hostage to limited options like brick-and-mortar, and Art Bell’s paranoia ruled midnight radio. As cultural buzzwords, “The X-Files” and Roswell evolved simultaneously, and who could say for sure just how much the former factored into the USAF’s PR problem with the latter, when the brass looked desperately moronic in blaming the 1947 incident on military crash-test dummy experiments in 1952. Such halcyon days, the Nineties:

Uncounted Arizona residents from Prescott to Phoenix wandering outside to catch a glimpse of comet Hale-Bopp only to be confronted instead by a humongous flying boomerang. A California suicide cult attempting to climb aboard via applesauce and strychnine. Paranoia everywhere, Oklahoma City, Waco, Ruby Ridge, so unlike today. Everybody got caught up in “The Truth Is Out There” craze – even at a White House birthday party for John Podesta.

But you can’t go back. Even with music by Mark Snow. And even with script writers possessing a daunting command of their material. And even with clever contemporary hooks like the Jimmy Kimmel-Barak Obama 2015 chat about space aliens, and more generic swipes at cable-channel demagoguery (“What Bill O’Reilly knows about the truth could fill an eyedrop”). “Life,” as Mulder 2016 moped, “has become a punchline.”

De Void knows a few things about punchlines, and expects no satisfactory answers from The Great Taboo — not in fiction and certainly not from this fool’s errand of a blog. But Sunday night’s latest convoluted tangle of “X-Files” conspiracies reminded me why I’d drifted away from the show a couple of seasons of seasons before its 2002 wrap. After a nine-year run and two movies, it became pretty clear the writers lacked an end game, then as now. They boxed themselves onto such an incoherent ledge, De Void didn’t care much anymore. And unlike 20 years ago, today I can get all this stuff – “false flag” operations, hybrid aliens, “a venal conspiracy of men against humanity,” as Mulder put it – from the Internet.

When you dump all this junk into the same laundry basket, as last night’s “My Struggle” episode did, it goes down like fast food. To wit: Mulder spends a decade chasing space aliens and it takes less than an hour to persuade him to rewrite his whole world view? Also: Somebody please tell me “the truth is out there” and “I want to believe” really didn’t make their way into the dialogue. Somebody tell me the evil talk-show guy didn’t actually say there’s a plot to quote “take over America.” But maybe that’s already happened. One of “The X-Files” biggest sponsors last night was Scientology. Maybe the teachings of Xenu filtered into the narrative. How would we know, one way or the other?

That said, De Void will probably tune in again, hoping for a glimpse of the A-game, Michael Jordan’s post-up jumper with the Washington Wizards. No point in trying to figure out what the writers haven’t, either. Twenty years of eroding standards on every front and all I need anymore is that occasional moment hanging in empty space like a little diamond. (That image isn’t original — I lifted it from Sartre.)